PSA When someone is eating lunch in the office please just leave them the fuck alone.

I can't recall the number of times I've been literally lifting food to my mouth when someone just rocks up and starts yakking about some work related issue with zero fucking consideration for the fact I'm trying to refuel and recoup.

Today it wasn't me; I experienced this vicariously, watching my poor colleague trying to eat, then being approached by someone; then another. Moments later the poor guy had 3-4 people literally crowded around him excitedly conversing and poking questions at him. I could see he just wanted it to go away so he could eat.

So just in case this makes a difference to anyone it reaches:

If you see someone eating lunch. Show some fucking self-restraint and just leave them to it, eh? Thought for the day.

Can anyone recommend a book or course on the mathematical symbology needed to be able to read The Art of Computer Programming? My biggest problem with these kinds of theory books is they assume knowledge of those branch of maths, and I don't even know the name of it to begin looking! Even concepts I know how to code look foreign, viewed in this way, but I want to understand.

There absolutely needs to be a software development term, for when you've spent longer answering a client's repeated questions about how long a task will take, than it will actually take to do the task.

Be good at job, have lazy coworkers who can't be bothered getting into the project. End up developing most of it. End up having to do client meetings as well because you've come to be the only one who knows how it works. Start to get tired after being relied on for everything. Be pressured to work late because now you're the only one who can fix it... Other devs just tinkering around the edges. Get refused leave requests because deadline after deadline. Work morning till night feeling increasingly burned out, Covid curfew means you can't even leave the house during the week, start to go insane. Leave request refused again. Ok I haven't had any time off in a while year now. Fuck this. Quit. Company sorry, try to keep you. How about no.

Seeing the overwhelming demand for JavaScript and Node.JS in my local job listings makes me fearful for mine and my children's future; and leaves me with an aching, bitter sense of disappointment in us, the development community.

It never had to leak out of the browser... what have we done?

Anyone else have a partner who, if you have an App idea and tell them about it, responds with "All the time I've known you, you've never published an App, just give up and don't think about it". It's so motivational.

I am really not sure what to make of this...

A local digital agency was (and still is) advertising for several positions - 5 positions in fact ranging across UX designer, senior consultant, iOS lead, Android lead.

I interviewed with their CEO once, 3 years ago, when the company was much smaller and was offered the job but politely declined after much deliberation and went for a different job.

A year later the CEO messaged me and said he still remembers me and if I'm ever looking, please get in touch.

Fast forward to 10 days ago; I see the positions they're now advertising, and faced with a declining situation at my current work, decide "I liked that CEO, his growing company looks good - let's go for it"... and launch into their application process for a senior consultant role.

The process is:
1 - Phone screening - I had a 50 minute call in which I got on with the guy well and he more or less immediately told me I'd passed
2 - Coding challenge - A pretty in-depth one, I had a week to do it and, since I continue to hold down a demanding full-time job, it took me the whole 7 days - balls-to-the-wall coding, wife looking after the kids etc.
3 - An hour of pair coding with their engineers to add a new feature to the back-end of the website I'd produced for (3).
4 - An hours general technical interview.

...not an unusually long process perhaps, but pretty thorough, and one they'd obviously planned quite well with nicely designed emails to 'track' each stage etc.

I feel I did quite well on all counts except one: I didn't write Unit Tests for the website backend as I just ran out of time, but I called this out in the documentation (which I was also asked to produce) along with a strategy on how I'd write them. Since they fairly called this out as disappointing in the otherwise very positive feedback, I implemented all the Unit Tests over the weekend and updated them.

So comes the call as to whether I've got the job... their answer was, to paraphrase, "It's all positive, your X, Y and Z qualities are obviously great for us etc. the only thing the guys thought you might need to adapt to was our branching strategies and so we just need to find the right time to hire you", the guy waxed lyrical about how they need to balance the demand for staff with work coming in etc. and how they're still exploring opportunities to grow the team and they want to stay in close touch and update me regularly.

It was all friendly but I said "I need to ask you a direct question; you have several roles actively advertised, did I lose out to another candidate?". "No no no, not at all" he says "It's not the case that I've had another phone call telling someone they've got the job and giving you this call to just hold you at arms length because we might want to hire you later; we think you'd be a great fit for the team but we need to find the right time to slot you in etc. and with regards to the advertising we always advertise because it wouldn't be a good look if we completely shut that down and we always want to talk to people".

So unless he's just lying because he didn't have the heart to tell me I wasn't god enough (despite giving a lot of other glowing positive feedback), or lying that someone else got the job... then I'm left with the conclusion that there was never any job in the first place... they made me go through a week of coding and effort just so I could sit on their waiting list?

Is this a new thing. Seems like bullshit timewasting to me.

Back to doing some good ol' HTML/CSS web layout after a long time away.

CSS Flex and Grid - finally!!! Isn't something like this how it should always have been?

I started out in the world of Java Layout Managers and then native Contraint-based layouts. Whatever their limitations; they have always been at least sane and consistent.

I was never able to fully mentally model the clusterfuck of arbitrary behaviours that came along with 'float'ing DIV's. So glad I can largely see the back of it.

Ever feel like you spend more time saying how it's going, than actually going?

Fuck Microsoft.

I am not an 'M$ Hater', this isn't anything about their business practices. I'm just a developer who wants to get shit done. Maybe the JVM ecosystem has spoiled me, but I'm on a C# based project right now. Writing the Application logic was fine, C# is a solid language, WCF is an absolute fucking nightmare of a framework; it just seems completely incoherent mash of config files and things you have to do programmatically, all of it catered to super complex use cases leaving a dozen hoops to jump through for even the simple ones. The object model just seems arbitrary to me. But none of that prepared me for the deployment. Just trying to get a Middleware to auto start with the web-server is a whole new level of pain, I've configured the App Pool, the Website, Used ACL to set the permissions, condfigured OWIN keys in several places and still the fucking thing won't start. Also can you believe that just auto starting something is a 'Windows feature' that has to be separately installed? Fuck those guys.

If by any chance someone is reading this who worked on WCF: get bent.

Bring back Kotlin/Ktor, I deployed a simple web-app in about an hour using gretty, the documentation had about 5 easy steps.

As a team lead, has anyone got any positive advice to dealing with a seriously under-performing developer?

In this case; the Developer appears not to be outright lazy, due to the volume of work they get through, but the quality is poor.

Despite having made several subtle attempts, I cannot get them to stop 'leaning' on other developers in the team to hand them the solution on the plate. When I've told them to come and ask me, I found out later they revert to private messaging other Devs on Slack for the answers.

Their work it's very often riddled with bizarre implementation approaches and copy/paste from other areas of the code base which I've told them not to do. Today, they polluted a number of low-level classes with support for one high-level specific use case - which shows a disregard for the App's architecture.

It takes us longer as a team to do the PR than it would do to just scrap it and re-implement.

It's what I'd expect from a very junior Developer; except for the number of years of experience they have, they should be beyond this... I want to try and help them, perhaps with some personal coaching, I'm just worried I'd be wasting my effort.

Furiously added an entry to the company glossary today:

Process Vortex

State of being, in which a developer struggles fruitlessly to deliver value through working code, finding their efforts beset on all sides by process considerations.
Ultimately, the developer achieves nothing but to mentally cycle through a dazzling merry-go-round of process rules and Jira updates.
Left untreated, this condition can quickly degenerate into Atlassian Madness.

Usage

Manager: Another code-tastic day in front of the IDE? How's progress on those sweet algorithms we talked about last week?
Developer: Nah, the Delivery Manager threw me into a Process Vortex, I've been trying to climb out all day.
Manager: Eesh - good luck with that!

"Sorry I'll be delivering your software late; I spent the first 2/3 of the available time on writing the painstaking documentation that you insisted I produce for approval, all while I knew exactly how it was going to be implemented, but was frustratingly unable to get to the first line of code." - couldn't you have just approved the implementation - it's called Agile? FFS. Enterprise IT, folks; not even once.